Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (46 page)

“I’m gonna go clean up,” Rachel said. Every inch of her body felt crusty with stress. She wanted nothing more than to soak herself in a hot bath until she stopped trembling, but she’d settle for coffee in the break room.

She tried to stand and couldn’t; her knees had frozen in place and buckled under her.

“C’mon,” Santino said, and helped her up. She threw an arm across his shoulders again. He was a good foot taller than she was, and they resumed their earlier awkward stagger down the hallway.

The building had been evacuated. They encountered the odd person here and there, usually a paramedic who demanded they accompany him outside for medical assistance; Rachel and Santino ignored them and pushed on.

“I could carry you,” he said. 

“And my knees could magically heal themselves,” she said. “Since neither of those is about to happen, we’ll just make do.”

He laughed. 

When they reached the break room, Santino lowered her into the chair closest to the door. Rachel was relieved to find the seat was cool; everything that had happened had seemed to fall on top of each other, but it was somehow comforting to know there had been enough time for the chair to lose all trace of her body heat. 

“Coffee?” Santino asked. 

“Yes,” she said, then saw the mess where she had dropped the coffee pot. The carafe had burst, throwing glass and water across the linoleum. “No.”

There was a knock on the wall beside the open door. Sturtevant walked in before they could answer.

“Just got the call,” he said. “Minor injuries, mostly, but there’s no sign of Witcham or Glazer.”

“There won’t be,” Santino sighed. “At least we know why the ventilation in the garage was crap. They had it blocked off for their escape route. They had this planned out for months.”

“Yeah, I’ve already called the service company. They’ve got some explaining to do. Did you see where Witcham went?” Sturtevant asked Rachel, his hand moving towards his pocket for his phone.

“No,” she said, keeping her voice steady. The inevitable giggle fit was creeping closer. “I’m so burned out right now that I can’t see through an open window. Santino’s right, though. Glazer let himself get taken because he knew he could walk out of here whenever he wanted.”

“I brought him back to First,” the Chief of Detectives said, shaking his head. “We could have interrogated him in Virginia and none of this would have happened.”

“Nobody was killed, sir,” Rachel reminded him. “It could have been much worse. And there was no way you could have known.”

“Besides,” Santino added. “Glazer would have found a way to be transferred back to First District Station. All of this was pretty much inevitable.”

Rachel dropped her head to the table and used her arms to hide her face.

“Agent Peng,” Sturtevant said after a long moment. “I should apologize. I had no cause to threaten you by taking away your place with us.”

“S’okay,” Rachel replied from inside of the hollow of her arms. Santino leaned forward and poked her, and she drew herself together and sat up. Her head started pounding. “You did what you thought was right.”

“But it wasn’t right. Hill and I had a long conversation about OACET. He asked me to remember how every branch of government has its own agenda. Sometimes it’s convenient for me to forget you’re not actually one of my officers. You were trying to tell us something before you interviewed Glazer. Was it about Hanlon?”

Rachel nodded curtly at Sturtevant. She wished she could thank Hill for giving her such a perfect excuse. 

“I should have listened,” Sturtevant said. “In the future, please feel free to remind me that you’re a peer instead of a subordinate.

“And grow some gray hair or some wrinkles,” he said, grinning. “You look too young.”

“A few more days like today, sir, and I’m sure that will take care of itself.”

He nodded. “You have the evening off, Agent Peng. You too, Officer Santino. The paperwork will keep.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, and meant it. Then: “Sir?”

He looked back at her. 

“You remember how Glazer threatened me with a secret?”

Beside her, Santino perked up warily.

“He wasn’t lying,” Rachel continued. “Something worse is coming. We should talk before it does.”

Chief Sturtevant chuckled, and swept the pool of glass and water from the broken coffee pot around with his shoe. “One crisis at a time, Agent Peng.”

Santino sighed in relief as Sturtevant closed the door behind him. “That was ballsy.”

“Ball-less,” she corrected. “And I needed to do it. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of pink slips.”

“You wouldn’t be unemployed,” he said. “You’d just go back to OACET.”

She shrugged. “But I wouldn’t be here.”

Her partner grinned.

There was a second knock, this one against the metal of the closed door. Santino looked at her as he got up.

“Hell if I know who it is,” she said. “I’m all but shut down right now.”

Santino opened the door. Jason had propped himself up against the jamb. His head was heavily bandaged in white gauze, his skin so pale it was hard to tell where the one ended and the other began.

“Can I talk to Rachel?” Jason asked.

“Uh…” Santino was lost.

“I’m offline,” Jason explained, and touched the gauze wrapped around his head. 

Santino glanced back at Rachel, who nodded. “Yeah,” Santino said. “See you guys later.”

Jason looped a hand under the backrest of the chair closest to her and tried to use his body weight to tug it away from the table. Rachel pushed it towards him; her arms felt like lead.
How many Agents does it take to move a chair?
she thought, and the first of the giggles escaped. “How are you doing?” she asked to cover it up. 

“We’re about to find out,” Jason said, and laced his fingers together. “Make sure I shut down if I’m about to stroke out or something, okay?” He brightened as he came back online, and sighed in relief as the link welcomed him home.

“Better?”

“Yeah.”
He closed his eyes and let the collective wash over him.

Rachel gave him a few minutes to let him catch up with the link, then asked:
“What did you want to talk about?”

Jason paused before he closed himself tight against the others.
“
I think this might be for you,” he whispered.

His voice was so low that she had trouble hearing him. “What?”

“This,” he said, and pressed something into her hand. “I found it in my pocket when I woke up.”

She didn’t bother to flip her implant to a close scan; she knew what it was by the feel of it. “I am so sorry,” she whispered back. “I thought Glazer was going to cut his way out of here. I didn’t know they had a real escape plan. And we needed
...
You know what we needed.” Her voice cracked on a giggle that was too close to a sob. “I’m so sorry.” 

Jason already knew; she had been carrying guilt when he touched her. “It’s okay,” he assured her, still speaking in a whisper. He covered her hand with his own and his sincerity flooded through her. “I wanted you to know it really is okay. Mulcahy told me you just saved us from the think tanks. That’s worth a concussion any day.”

She wasn’t as sure, but she slipped the small object into her own pocket for safekeeping.

A paperclip twisted into the shape of a heart.

TWENTY-TWO

There were late fireflies and a new baby, and the promise of barbeque after the caterers finished setting out the steam trays. This was one of OACET’s civilized parties, open to friends and relatives; Shawn, almost casual in jeans and a light long-sleeved tee, had promised he would talk about nothing but fishing and would keep the conversations short. 

She had stolen the baby and commandeered an overstuffed chaise lounge that had been dragged out onto the patio. Rachel lay supine with a pillow stuffed under her busted knees and Avery wrapped in a gentle bear hug on her chest, occasionally planting kisses on the baby’s thin scalp. Avery was in that fleeting stage where she could sleep through a full-blown bacchanalia, which was convenient; even when they kept themselves on a short leash, the Agents would start the next day with a hunt for their clothes. 

Babies are blue,
she thought.
And silver and gold and cream and seafoam green, all puffing in a cloud, but mostly soft, soft blue. 
Rachel might never move again. 

“Any chance you’ll let me hold her?” Santino plunked down beside them on an ottoman.

“Nope.” Rachel snuck another kiss. “I’m not giving her up until she’s hungry or I have to pee.”

Her partner handed her a fresh beer with a swirly straw. 

“Dirty pool, Mister Bond,” she said, and swept the beer over her head in an awkward arc so the condensation wouldn’t drip on the baby.

“Sturtevant called,” he said.

“Is he coming?” Rachel asked.

He shook his head. “Said he had a prior commitment.”

She wasn’t surprised. The Chief of Detectives had avoided her most of the week but she didn’t hold it against him. Rachel was sure someone at the Metropolitan Police Department was pressuring him about their alliance with OACET, but she didn’t know how, and tonight she couldn’t be bothered to care. Sturtevant would probably resolve it without her help; if not, she’d wait a few more days for the dust to settle before she kicked it up again.

The whole mess had ended beautifully for OACET, with back-to-back press conferences leaving barely enough time for the pundits to nitpick each one apart. They lacked the legal language to define why the Witcham shooting wasn’t a good one, the circumstances being so surreal that Rachel had been given a pass. She was federal, not police, and those four perfect shots through Glazer’s legs made it impossible for Internal Affairs to argue that Rachel had intended anything other than to incapacitate. If she had killed Witcham, or if he hadn’t kidnapped children? Well, things probably would have been different. But the video of her turning his legs into shards of bone made it a little easier to accept that Witcham hadn’t gotten away entirely scot-free.

(That video had been viewed over eighteen million times on YouTube this week alone; Rachel had nearly achieved talking dog status. The conspiracy theorists had seized on Witcham’s incrimination of Senator Hanlon and were running wild with it. Maybe, with luck, some intrepid reporter would try to fact-check those rumors and would do OACET’s work for them.) 

Several days after the shooting, Charlotte Gallagher had arrived on the mansion’s doorstep, unannounced. Rachel had been at First District Station at the time, so Mulcahy had taken Gallagher on a tour of the upper floors, the two of them working out the details of a liaison of Agents to the FBI. Four Agents had been reassigned on temporary loan. Rachel and Phil were teaching them the finer points of looking through walls.

Edwards had cornered Rachel in the coffee shop, demanding to know why she hadn’t bothered to keep him updated on the case; he had learned about Eric Witcham after he had been served the subpoena. Rachel had shrugged and played dumb until Edwards swept her cappuccino from the table, and then Rachel had lost her temper and manipulated him into a brief staring contest until he fled the store, shaken. On impulse, she had limped after him to apologize. They ended up taking shelter at a bus stop from the sheeting rain of a late summer storm, reminiscing about the man both she and Edwards had come to know as Charley Brazee. They had shaken hands before she caught a cab home.

And then Carlota had gone into labor. All of OACET had fallen silent while their first baby was born. (Mainly because they couldn’t hear each other over Carlota’s shouting; when Rachel had asked Mako why he hadn’t blocked his wife from the link, the huge weightlifter blinked at her and walked away, shaking his head.) Jenny Davies and the rest of the medical team had concerns about the neurological implications of introducing a new mind to the world in the middle of a technological psychic maelstrom, but the kid was loved beyond belief and they all decided that nothing else mattered.

Everything had wrapped up neat and tidy, except for those last two questions.

She had walked in on Mulcahy, drawn by her own voice as she passed his office. The lights were out and he had his feet up on his desk as he listened to the audio recording of her brief phone call with Witcham. She stood in the doorway and heard herself say:
“Then why try to break us? Why not help us?”

She and Mulcahy had locked eyes, and he shrugged. Rachel had eased herself back through his door and limped away.

Neither of them had felt the need to ask whether Witcham was just that good.

Or what it might mean that she had crippled the man who had singlehandedly altered the public’s opinion of OACET.

Avery twitched, a tiny infant dream tugging at her. Rachel snuggled her chin up beside the baby’s soft peach fuzz hair and listened to her breathe.

Rachel ran a quick scan through the crowd. The outsiders marveled at the mansion. At night, lit by the faux gas lamps, it was easy to overlook how run-down the place was. There was a volleyball game and some early swimmers paddling in the pool, and enough talking and laughter outside of the link to make it a real party.